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' ,,"" , .: ,.",': lit ""It" lti"!;1: ':, ,,' " t 1' " C" : it r" C L' 't ; ",1{ fj.'y;,'5.::"",,C i :::É':li",B:'P':":HtG:' ;'Ê 8 o (),/- '3 , 6';". 3"3 2:,i; Bargain Books I Save up to 80 0 /0 on publishers overstocks, I lll1ports, reprints-save 300/0 or more on a huge I selection of current books and best sellers. Over I I 60 subject areas-America's biggest bargain book I selection. Write for FREE CATALOG. L!l am ilten 53 3 a a V illag e , CT 06031-50 0 the goods and chattels essential to the glutted, upholstered bourgeois life. Left more or less to rot under Communist rule, it has now been occupied by a tribe of strung-out, noctambulant artists On the dim, rickety stairs near the front door, a band rehearses. The gui- tarist strums a wooden plank, while the drummer pummels a plastic water flask. Primal screaming can be heard from behind a door: a play is in progress. The walls are a pandemonium of acrylic slogans, the corridors puddled. Behind this haunted house is a sculpture gar- den, where a helicopter with flailing, buckled rotors has crash-landed. An overturned bus looms from a sandpit. Dogs scratch and scavenge, urinating on spent torpedoes. The earth throbs: somewhere down below, a bunker houses a disco. Ruins at least make an ideal playground. B ERLIN is accustomed to the rutWess perfectionism of architects, and to the decay that inevitably overtakes their grand projects. To carve out a new axis for the capital, Hitler's planners de- molished thousands of buildings. An avenue was to be set aside for the dis- play of weapons captured from trampled enemies; a boulevard goose-stepped to- ward an assembly hall, which would have been the largest building in the world. Hitler intended to change Ber- lin's name to Germania when the work was complete, and had set aside a date In 1950 for the ceremony. Offered a blank slate at Pots darner Platz-or, rather, a stretch of scruffy grass, infested by rabbits-Renw Piano inscribed his own signature on the place. The logo of the Dairnler- Benz develop- ment, a feathery doodle, derives from one of his earliest scribbles. The lines in his sketch refer to the streets that intersect here; they also, providentially, make up a billowing, boastful "P." Having affixed his own monogram, Piano modelled the site's public spaces on those of his native Italy-sunny, convivial, remote from the seeping skies and northern chill of Ber- lin Theater Platz, with its casino and hotel, imitates the fan-shaped piazza at the center of Siena. "And here," Piano's assistant Roger Baumgarten said to me, "is our Wenice." From the top of a skeletal skyscraper, he pointed down at an artificial lagoon, where turbid water from the construc- THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 28 & MAY 5, 1997 tion pits was being cleaned before the pink-and-blue pipes carried it away. Berlin is fond of such fictions, which allow it to fancy that it belongs some- where else, in some place with a differ- ent and less onerous history. Germania has been replaced by another official fan- tasy: the dream of an ersatz, uprooted Italy. Setting out to relaunch the state, the government of the newly unified Ger- many called in image-makers from abroad. Rites of passage were devised for the Reichstag, which the politicians will reoccupy when they move back from Bonn. The cratered, scowling Prussian pile-left derelict after its sei- zure by the Red Army in 1945, clum- sily patched up in the nineteen-sixties- was wrapped by Christo in 1995. It wore its coat of silver cloth like a bridal out- fit, or a shroud: the proper costume for a transformation As soon as this fancy dress came off, the British architect Norman Foster began to reconstruct the building. A glass-and-steel dome will surmount the debating chamber, with a twisted cone of mirrors to refract the sun. Christo covered the Reichstag in order to mystifY it, hinting at magical changes inside; Foster promised to make it symbolically transparent. But glasnost has its limits, as Foster found when he began to design an eagle for the new parliament building. (The old one over the Bundestag rostrum in Bonn could not be moved.) The ea- gle is Germany's corporate logo, the tra- ditional emblem of Teutonic power. Its spread wIngs overshadow the earth; it has a pronged beak, and in the past its prehensile claws often used the swastika as a perch. Last year , Foster reflected that-given Germany's aquiline behav- ior during the twentieth century-the abrupt angle of the eagle's head and the span of its wings might need to be altered. Its talons would also require a manicure. He wanted the bird, it was said, to be "slenderer." There were im- medIate protests about this foreign cam- paign to tame the country's pet predator. The iconography of the new eagle (pac- ified or unrepentant?) remains a state secret. Meanwhile, in makeshift rituals, the scarred ground of Berlin is consecrated all over again. At the topping-out in Potsdamer Platz last October, DanIel Barenboim-using semaphore flags in-